Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, a memoir of his relationship with his sister, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer – perhaps more than we needed to know. If that sounds snarky, after 400 pages of score settling, chest thumping, wild indiscretion and some truly touching passages about his late sister, the reader is left with a head-spinning story of the world that created Diana and a certain sourness at the manner in which it is told. Let’s start with the headlines in last week’s Daily Mail, the newspaper to whom Spencer sold serialisation of a book which includes a line describing tabloid journalists as “those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls”.
Perhaps he meant a different set of hacks. Anyway the top line in the Mail was that, shortly after Diana’s death, King Charles insulted her in a phone call to Spencer: “‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.’” Your take on this quote will likely dictate how you receive the book, and here’s mine: I’m willing to believe the king behaved badly, but “hissed” is a red flag, one of those embellishments, like “snarled” or “flounced”, that writers tend to use to make those they’re writing about appear worse. Spencer, always the injured party, has so many axes grinding away in this book that at times it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying.
Before we get to that, the question on everyone’s lips is: why write this book now? Spencer maintains it’s because, as the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death drew near, he kept being asked to contribute to other people’s projects. Rather than allow the narrative to be guided by “some TV producer” from a network “I will never watch” he promptly got on with his own.
Likely that’s not the sole reason; elsewhere in the book he writes about how, back in the day, his father was always at risk of running out of cash to run Althorp, the family’s Northamptonshire estate, and one wonders if the present earl is having similar difficulties. For fans of petty grievances, among whom I count myself, the book is an absolute corker of resentment, and in Spencer we have a hero who, decades after the fact, is still harping on about a great many things involving a large cast of characters who he has absolutely not forgiven for any of it. While telling the story of his and Diana’s relationship, there are drive-bys on Peter Carter-Ruck, Princess Michael of Kent, Princess Margaret, his three ex-wives, whom he describes in an amazing parenthetical take down as “all double divorcees”, and members of a police protection squad who, in 1986, let sniffer dogs jump all over his furniture.
If too many words are spent on, for example, the perfidiousness of Martin Bashir, I could read an entire book on the subject of Spencer’s horror at what his stepmother, Raine, did to the interiors at Althorp, including installing “exceptionally ugly double glazing”, “shiny velveteen” upholstery, and “unsightly wall-to-wall carpeting”. (This is before we get to the scene in which Raine, standing at the top of the staircase in search of breakfast, bellows to staff below, “where’s my fucking egg?”) Interspersed with these delights is a portrait of Diana that is affectionate, sad, and lovely in places. Spencer suffers the pain of the less famous sibling who doesn’t want to give up his own version of their childhood and there’s a stiffness to some passages as Spencer insists it was all less unhappy than the record implies. His portrait of their mother, Frances, feels like a useful corrective to a figure who has been publicly maligned, and who comes across in the book as the parent most responsible for Diana’s gifts: spirited, mildly eccentric, a more interesting character than the plodding males in the Spencer line. (Charles, winningly, allows that this is the case, pointing out that the men in his family have always been outclassed by the women.) And of course there is the devastating account of the coldness and aggression of the then Prince of Wales.
Spencer tells us that Charles’s poor behaviour towards his sister began from the very start of their courtship, during which he commented on her weight, ignored her at parties and told her he didn’t love her, to the extent that, Spencer writes, Diana tried to get out of the engagement. Their father told her it was too late. This all chimes with other accounts of the doomed marriage, albeit in gorier detail, and explains the fury of Spencer’s finest hour, the speech he gave at Diana’s funeral in which he lambasted not only the press but the royals, reclaiming the young princes William and Harry for their mother’s “blood family”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
